Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [9]
But as soon as Amy Cowan arrived he knew she was trouble.
Chapter 4
Even as the plane began to fall from the sky Jessica kept the smile on her face.
The mechanical airline stewardess smile. She was fooling no one, but she kept smiling and moving quickly along the aisles offering empty reassurance to the passengers. It was her job.
A jet-plane is heavier than air. Its shape and the thrust of its engines enable it to fend off gravity, but inevitably this is a losing battle. Gravity will always win in the end. Usually passenger jets end their days on a runway somewhere, quietly taken out of commission and dismantled at the end of a long service life. When you unfasten components from the carcass of the plane the sheared-off heads of the old bolts fall to the ground to roll off the tarmac and vanish in the weeds beside the airstrip. Gravity wins.
But at other times gravity wins before an airliner grows old and retires. Sometimes it happens in the middle of a flight.
It’s a fact of life. You learn to live with it. To accept the thought of dropping out of the sky.
You just hope it won’t happen on your shift.
Now it was happening on Jessica’s shift.
She moved down the long aisle of first class, reassuring the passengers. Smiling. She walked past the women sitting on either side of aisle C. They looked oddly calm. They were the only two passengers talking. Throughout the rest of the cabin there was a silence of deep respect and intense concentration, like you might get in a church full of devoted parishioners waiting for a vital word from the pulpit.
No one was looking at anyone else. Every passenger seemed intensely focused on their own inner world as the plane lurched earthward with sickening speed. It was a terrible silence. The kind you hope never to hear on an aircraft, because such a silence can only happen in the absence of that most familiar and reassuring of sounds. The sound of the engines.
The engines had stopped. No one was talking. The plane was falling out of the sky. The silence was worse than if they were all screaming. Jessica smiled at the passengers and thanked God for the two women in row C who kept stubbornly talking.
‘It’s called a windshear,’ said the white woman matter-offactly. ‘The plane flies into an area of extreme turbulence, usually caused by a descending column of cool air hitting the ground.’
‘Hits the ground and spreads outward in a circular pattern, right?’ said the black woman.
‘Right. Think of a ball-bearing dropped in oil. Same splash pattern. A circular fan of intense wind.’
‘That was the turbulence we felt.’
‘Yes,’ said Benny. ‘We hit a sudden headwind entering the circle of disturbance. But then when we were leaving the circle, the wind was going the other way.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Roz.
‘Yes. We hit a sudden tailwind. The combination of violent winds in two different directions cut our airspeed.’
‘And consequently caused a sudden loss of lift.’ The cabin was completely silent around them. You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening to them as the plane dropped out of the sky.
‘It’s called a windshear,’ repeated Benny.
‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’
‘Yes,’ said Benny. ‘Stewardess!’
The woman came at once. ‘Stewardess,’ said Benny,
‘can you bring us a bottle of your best champagne?’
Jessica was galvanized into action.